Tailpiece
Carole Nelson Douglas on Other Matters
Because some of the earlier Midnight Louie mysteries are dedicated to “the real and original Midnight Louie, nine lives are not enough,” some readers have thought the inspiring stray cat was part of my personal family.
Not so. His rescue was detailed in the Tailpiece to the first Midnight Louie book, Catnap. The woman who rescued the koi-loving homeless black cat from a Palo Alto motel and shipped him to her Minnesota apartment found him friendly but unable to adapt to confined living arrangements.
She put a long and intriguingly expensive ad in the classifieds section (remember those?) of the newspaper I worked for as a reporter and feature writer, offering him to a good home for one dollar. (She’d spent a lot more than that on his airfare back.)
I’d always liked to follow offbeat “leads” and wrote an article on Louie’s journey and the new home he found on a farm. After writing the first who/what/when/where sentence, I paused. Maybe I should let the cat tell his tale in his own words. Maybe the real and original Midnight Louie inspired me to do just that. Black cats do have that “mystical” aura.
Eleven years later, when I left my union-guaranteed-for-life newspaper job (remember those?) to write fiction freelance, that feline “voice” revisited me and demanded a cameo role in four Las Vegas–set short romances (with mystery). The editor happily bought the quartet, then cut much of the mystery and Louie out, without telling me.
I told you nine lives were not enough for this canny feline survivor. Midnight Louie did an athletic flip-flop, landing on his feet in a mystery series bearing his name that featured any ongoing human romance elements in their proper place, as subplot.
In 1996, the series publisher, Tor Books, sponsored a wonderful Midnight Louie Adopt-a-Cat tour that brought me and homeless cats to adoption/book-signing events in every region of the country. They started in my new home state, Texas, with multi-city events. And, new to the animal rescue scene, the publicists didn’t know about no-kill shelters and “booked” me into the main city shelters.
I had six rescue cats and a rescue dog at home, but I saw so many, many beautiful kittens and cats, so many cats only a year old and kicked out, at stop after stop, it was heartbreaking.
When a small black cat in the open colony at Lubbock Animal Services looked up at me and “skritched,” I bent to pick it up. Midnight Louie Jr. had me on hello. There’s more to the story, but it wasn’t until three weeks later my husband and I drove almost seven hundred miles round trip to fetch our seventh cat.
We stayed overnight at a nice motel and came back to the room after dinner. I have never seen a cat so aware that he’d found a home, and so happy, not anxious at all. He jumped on the bed when we retired and moved back and forth on our chests all night, purring and meowing until he was hoarse by morning and we were sleepless in Lubbock.
He wasn’t very big, his coat was dull, and his tail had been broken in two places so he couldn’t lift it higher than a croquet-hoop position.
Long black hair turned glossy, and his tail did lift again, the mysterious break hidden. A short mystery story, “Junior Partner in Crime,” is my imagination of how he might have got in that condition following in Senior’s fictional crime-fighting footsteps.
Since there is only one “real and original” and eternal Midnight Louie, he became, after a brief detour as “Midnight Louise” (sometimes it’s hard to tell in busy shelters), the Midnight Louie Jr. seen with me in the dust jacket photograph.
After fifteen years, he was called to the Rainbow Bridge as I was finishing this book. He fought hard not to leave, and he did not go alone.
Xanadu, his longtime pal and the chow-husky cross pup I’d found on the street four months before meeting Louie Jr., had a massive seizure the very morning we were about to call the vet for Midnight Louie Jr.’s last appointment.
He may not have been “the real and original,” but he was the best and the brightest in our lives for a long time and will never leave, not really.